Marco Roth: The Rise of the Neuronovel

What is a neuronovel? American literary critic Marco Roth says writers are abandoning the mind in favour of the brain -- moving from a psychological investigation of character to bio-medical models of behaviour. But if our actions are explained by the chemical balance, or imbalance, in our heads, then where does that leave love?

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Transcript

Peter Mares: The nature versus culture debate has found its way into literary criticism. American critic Marco Roth has identified a new kind of fiction: the neuronovel, in which the mind gives way to the brain and psychology is replaced by a biomechanical model of behaviour. In the neuronovel character is not explained by upbringing or relationships or social environment, but by the chemical balance—or perhaps imbalance—in the brain. Roth cites Ian McEwan as a leading exponent of the neuronovel: works of fiction like Enduring Love and Saturday Another example is Mark Haddon's The curious Incident of the dog in the Night-time.

Marco Roth is founding editor of the literature and politics magazine n + 1, and assistant professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School University in New York. And he joins us from Philadelphia. Marco Roth, welcome to The Book Show.

Marco Roth: Thank you.

Peter Mares: What is a neuronovel?

Marco Roth: Well, your introduction put it very well. A neuronovel is a novel featuring a character with an identifiable neurological disorder according to contemporary medical science. It could be de Clerambault's syndrome in McEwan's Enduring Love or the Huntington's chorea in McEwan's Saturday, which is a genetic disease that affects the brain. Others include Capgras syndrome, a syndrome in which somebody thinks that a loved one has been replaced by an exact alien replica of the loved one. and these are all disorders that have chemical genetic causes. So a paranoid schizophrenia in a recent novel called Lowboy that just came out in the States—I don't know if it's made it to Australia...

Peter Mares: Yes it has, indeed.

Marco Roth: ...as opposed to ordinary schizophrenia.

Peter Mares: And is this...I mean are you saying this is a new phenomenon, this idea of the neuronovel?

Marco Roth: I think it's a trend, or a tendency in novels; that when you track novels over the last ten years or longer, beginning with McEwan's Enduring Love in 1997, you start to see that these characters proliferate. Also the character with Tourette's syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn...it was one of these things where I was thinking about it and then as I thought about this I realised that there were more and more novels that I'd read that featured characters with identifiable neurological anomalies.

Peter Mares: And the novels you've mentioned would all be described, I guess, as literary novels, but we probably also see a lot of it in crime fiction, for example.

Marco Roth: Yes. It's part of the migration from crime genre fiction into literary fiction. Thrillers have used in some cases the more medically precise vocabulary for serial killers the better as far as the thriller writer is concerned. But I was interested in literary fiction.

Peter Mares: And why do you think we're seeing this trend?

Marco Roth: For one thing, my essay begins with a long view beginning with the decline of Freudian psychoanalysis in the United States as an all-purpose method of explanation and treatment. Also the end of what was called the linguistic turn in the humanities when people were trying to explain everything as...you know, in consciousness, structured like a language, everything is a language and therefore the language can be changed and we are infinitely changeable. This kind of hit a road block in the 1980s and gradually was replaced by philosophers who had been there all along arguing for the persistence of innate ideas and innate brain structures. And this model took over in the natural sciences and has been migrating into the humanities and in some ways literature is picking up on—and these are writers who were essentially doing research, you know the writer Oliver Sacks as a great writer about patients with specific neurological disorders I think hastened this.

Peter Mares: Yes, I was thinking as I read your essay, and you mention Oliver sacks, that The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which obviously was very widely read and which essentially looked at some of these strange psychiatric or mental disorders and the weird behaviours that result from them, but explain things in a kind of bio-medical manner.

Marco Roth: Yes. and what's interesting also is that those Oliver Sacks essays sometimes read like novels, which has to do with...he's aware of how to structure a plot very well. But if you go even further back there's a great book called The Mind of a Mnemonist, which was a case study by a Soviet psychologist that was published I believe in the late 1940s, which he tracks a case of synaesthesia. And the examples of the synaesthesia patent, they sound like high modernist prose, they sound like Joyce, they sound like Nabokov. This is just how this man thinks.

Peter Mares: Synaesthesia, just remind us, that's when you can feel colour, as it were.

Marco Roth: Yes, or smell colour. It's when you have a complete range of senses, so you would taste colour, or you would see colour as a taste, and you would be able to describe one sense in terms of any other sense. I'm not a scientist, by the way.

Peter Mares: Neither am I...but the other thing that I know has happened has been the development of the brain scan, which has aided a kind of biomedical, biomechanical approach to understanding the brain and the way it works. And we've seen writers like Daniel Dennett or Steven Pinker talking about the mind and how it works, so I guess there is a scientific influence on writers like Ian McEwan.

Marco Roth: Well McEwan and Pinker have a very close relationship. The problem with brain scans—and actually in some ways the problem with a lot of recent neurological discoveries is that they only work for patients with disorders. They don't know how a normal brain works yet. And what the brain scan can show you is they show you, oh, this part of the brain is getting warmer and therefore there's more activity in this part of the brain when you show this person a pornographic postcard. Or, gosh that part of the brain should be lighting up but it's not. So where the science is right now is in a very exciting place for scientists, which is that they know a lot more about how brains with specific neurological anomalies work, but we don't really know how a—and I'm going to use the word 'normal' here, which some readers and listeners might take issue with—but how...

Peter Mares: Well all the caveats are applied. We take that as given...

Marco Roth: But there's still a lot we don't know about how a normal brain functions at the molecular level. And so to me a lot of these novels end up short-changing the vast array of normal brain function that's still out there that we would call consciousness, and that used to be the purview of writers.

Peter Mares: To explore notions of consciousness and the self through a whole range of approaches, whether it's metaphor or psychology or someone's childhood or what have you.

Marco Roth: Exactly.

Peter Mares: I take it from reading your essay that you're quite uncomfortable with the rise of the neuronovel.

Marco Roth: Yes, it's a polemical essay in a sense, in that I'm hoping to push emerging novelists away from kind of research-based interest in neurological anomaly and back towards a more fully realised novel in which characters have relationships across different social strata, in which the family is explored. One of the things that happens with neurological novels because the focus is on describing very precisely—and also with great accuracy and beauty in the case of Haddon's Dog in the Night-time, for instance, you know, what it's like being an autistic person. The result of this is—and there's a fantastic family story in that novel, but the result of it is somehow that we end up sort of back where Freud left us, which is family is the root of problems, but a neuronovel will leave you with a united family at the end of it, as it does in McEwan's Saturday, rather than starting with the family and taking the character out into the world and...there's a narrowing of the novel I think that's occurred in a lot of these cases. And you have this crazy novel atmosphere of disturbances that was written about, you know, the man who mistook his wife for an alien who is just like his wife...

Peter Mares: He's a man with Capgras syndrome who believes his wife has been replaced by an imposter.

Marco Roth: Right. And that novel, although it's told entirely from the man's point of view, is really a great novel of marital fidelity from the wife's point of view, because she decides to stick with him. But the novel doesn't really get into why she sticks with him, which would be the most interesting thing about it.

Peter Mares: Because it's more preoccupied with this weird illness and exploring the consciousness of the husband.

Marco Roth: Right.

Peter Mares: Another objection you seem to have is in relation to Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, in which the figure who threatens the main character and his family suffers from a mental illness, and therefore the violence he threatens to wreak on the family is explained by that illness. And what fall away then are issues of class, or injustice, economic disparities in society and things like that.

Marco Roth: Yes. I think McEwan wants that novel to tread a very fine line between blaming all of society's problems on people's neurology, so this man is lower class because he has a brain disease in the same way that terrorists might be attacking us because they might not be as neurologically advanced. There's a kind of uncomfortable social Darwinism that lurks in the back of that book. And at the same time he doesn't want us to forgive these people for their neurological disorders. And so it forces one to think that maybe there's a natural order...that the social order is in fact a natural order, which you could read as a deep conservatism on McEwan's part and he's uncomfortable saying that he's politically one way or the other, but that novel in particular, with its backdrop of the Iraq war protests in London in 2003, that ends up being cancelled out completely by the neurological emphasis.

Peter Mares: But I wonder if that's not what's interesting about these novels, and why in fact they're valuable, because what we've had is the dominance of Freudian or Lacanian kind of psychological approach to character. Science would say I think that we have underestimated the biological, mechanical, chemical aspects of the brain. So isn't it good that novelists are now exploring this as well?

Marco Roth: I think you could say that the first neuronovels were a useful corrective to, for instance, the range of trauma-based fictions that were coming out in the early 90s in the United States in which everything was explained by childhood sexual abuse.

In general though—my polemical sense as a critic is that novels lose when they adopt a particular world view that they can't escape from. So in some ways what you want in a novel is a collision of possible explanatory models of the world.

Peter Mares: You want complexity and ambiguity.

Marco Roth: Exactly. I'm an old fashioned literary critic.

Peter Mares: And you're worried that the neuronovel is leading us to a much more reductionist approach to explaining human behaviour.

Marco Roth: I think that what happens if you're a novelist and you're not a scientist, and you pick up a neurological case study and you decide you want to make a character out of this neurological case study, you have to teach yourself a lot, and you're doing a lot of research, and a lot of the novels are saying look at my research, and in that sense they fade into non-fiction. And at the same time you have to spend a lot of time developing the readers' interests in the voice of a neurologically damaged character. And so this tends to in some ways slow down description a lot and keep character relations very restrained. And so even for instance in Haddon's Dog in the Night-time you have a character who can't even take the bus without having a meltdown because of over-stimulation. And that's a fascinating insight for one instant, but then at what point, if they're going to be a novelist who can actually take you on the bus...and what's interesting to me is that novelists now seem to be afraid of the social novel, in part because they may feel themselves that they're in isolation and that they only hang out with other novelists and speak to other novelists, and they wouldn't know how to write a social novel.

Peter Mares: And I guess if we took the neuronovel to its ultimate extent, then there's no such thing as love; there'd be the interaction of pheromones resulting from our biological history and our genetics and so on, and the chemical reactions that take place in our heads.

Marco Roth: Yes. That's in some ways already happening. People read books like The Female Brain, and in the essay I have an actual email that was sent to me before I went on a date in Brooklyn by someone who'd just read The Female Brain...

Peter Mares: Which is a very funny email, I have to say.

Marco Roth: Yes...who was telling me all the neurochemical things that would be going on. But then you go and you read a passage of DH Lawrence and you think, he's still got it. I'd rather have him telling me what's going on inside my head than a chemical description—even if the chemical description is true, it's not the limit. I'm actually very pro-science in a certain way. I'm not coming at this from a Luddite position, but I think there's a difference between what is happening at the chemical level and how we experience things. And our experiences of things may be chemical experiences, but we still don't really even want to have the language described in chemical terms.

Peter Mares: We still have feelings.

Marco Roth: Exactly.

Peter Mares: Marco Roth, thank you very much for your time.

Marco Roth: Thank you.

Peter Mares: Marco Roth is a founding editor of the literature and politics magazine n + 1, and assistant professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School University in New York, and you'll find a link to his article on the neuronovel on The Book Show website.

Guests

Marco Roth

Founding editor of the literature and politics magazine n + 1. He's written for the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the Nation. He is also Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School University in New York.